We recognize that there has been little information about development updates posted recently, but rest assured, we have been working hard on the next release, and we couldn't let the most recent developments go without being mentioned. There has been a dramatic increase in development activity: the issue list has been reduced by 35% this past weeks alone, and we are preparing to release a new Beta (this will be beta 3). We are looking forward to continuing the development of 2.1 and moving towards the Release Candidates and the "Gold" release.

This recent progress has been possible thanks to the incredibly valuable help from a new set of contributors: albertlast, Sesquipedalian and tinoest! In recognition of their contributions, we have given them the official title of "Development Contributor" and the "Consulting Dev" badge.

We would like to take this opportunity to both thank them and also to explain the Development Contributor program a little bit.

This program started as a way to officially recognize and provide a small reward (in reputation, if nothing else) those contributors who have been helping us on github. This group has helped us to coordinate our efforts more efficiently and has allowed us to have a clear and more open communication about issues, ideas, and future releases with people outside of the official "teams". In the future, we hope to see more interest and recognition of other contributors, and possibly to see some of the contributors become active in the community here, as well as on GitHub.

d3vcho(void):
Great job made by the three mentioned before (and for the many others who aren't mentioned) at GitHub. We all hope you can keep this pace.

Also, congratulations for your new badge :P

Steve:
Thanks for the update Suki and congrats to the three new contributors and a well done to the rest of the team. :)

Glyph:
Congrats guys! I'm excited to see the new release and I also look forward to helping in the coming weeks to the best of my ability. After learning how to use github and understanding the concept behind it will motivate me to actually contribute. I don't understand the concept behind merging a master with a separate branch (pull request), like what if a specific piece of code changes on the part you were updating? How will that work? In a large code edit scenario I'm afraid it'll get super complicated. Is there a discussion page like maybe IRC or something where we can discuss changes beforehand?

Antes:
Thanks for the update and a big thanks to our consultant devs :).